2019-02-22 HIRO @ WPI Graduate Research Innovation Exchange

After a rigorous fall 2018 semester, three HIRO lab members presented posters of their work at the WPI Graduate Research Innovation Exchange, a poster fair and competition across all graduate programs at WPI.

Tsung-Chi (TC) Lin presented work from his first semester at WPI in human fatigue in robot teleoperation. He has been using Delsys wireless EMG sensors to evaluate the progression of upper body fatigue in human teleoperators when using the motion capture interface.

The Motion-Mapping teleoperation interface for TRINA, which TC is evaluating for operator fatigue.

The motivation and methodology for this experiment were initially proposed in an IROS workshop paper last year [Mbanisi, Valiton 2018]. TC is evaluating fatigue prediction algorithms, and aims to suggest a fatigue estimation algorithm ideal for teleoperation interface assessment based on his evidence.

Heramb Nemlekar presented a poster on his work in fluid human-robot handovers. Heramb has been employing machine learning to teach the TRINA system to smoothly, quickly, and intuitively position its arm to give or receive an item from a human collaborator. Heramb’s work was presented at IROS in 2018, was submitted to ICRA 2019 [Nemlekar 2019] and continues to produce promising results in 2019.

The robot tries to predict a natural position (object transfer point, OTP) for receiving the object from a human.

Alexandra Valiton submitted a poster on her human perception-action coordination in teleoperation research from fall 2018. Alexandra seeks to design a shared autonomous controller for TRINA’s cameras; the human study started in fall 2018 is designed to capture human preference in camera selection and configuration when manipulation action has been trivialized, and Alexandra hopes to publish the results soon!

The setup for Alexandra’s Perception-Action Coordination human study.

Congratulations to these students on their hard work and promising results!